Add-ons

The eks-blueprints framework leverages a modular approach to managing Add-ons that run within the context of a Kubernetes cluster. Customers are free to select the add-ons that run in each of their blueprint clusters.

Within the context of the eks-blueprints framework, an add-on is abstracted as ClusterAddOn interface, and the implementation of the add-on interface can do whatever is necessary to support the desired add-on functionality. This can include applying manifests to a Kubernetes cluster or calling AWS APIs to provision new resources.

Supported Add-ons

The framework currently supports the following add-ons.

Addon	Description	x86_64/amd64	arm64
ACKAddOn	Adds ACK (AWS Controllers for Kubernetes .	✅
AdotAddOn	Adds AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) Operator.	✅	✅
AmpAdotAddOn	Deploys ADOT Collector for Prometheus to remote write metrics from AMP.	✅	✅
AppMeshAddOn	Adds an AppMesh controller and CRDs.	✅
ApacheAirflowAddOn	This add-on is an implementation of Apache Airflow on EKS using the official helm chart.	✅
ArgoCDAddOn	Provisions Argo CD into your cluster.	✅	✅
AWS Batch for EKS	Enables EKS cluster to be used with AWS Batch on EKS	✅	✅
AWS for Fluent Bit	Provisions Fluent Bit into your cluster for log aggregation and consumption.	✅	✅
AWS Load Balancer Controller	Provisions the AWS Load Balancer Controller into your cluster.	✅	✅
AWS Node Termination Handler	Provisions Node Termination Handler into your cluster.	✅
AWS Private CA Issuer	Installs AWS Private CA Issuer into your cluster.	✅
Backstage	Installs Backstage.	✅
CertManagerAddOn	Adds Certificate Manager to your EKS cluster.	✅	✅
CalicoOperatorAddOn	Adds the Calico CNI/Network policy cluster.	✅	✅
CloudWatchAdotAddOn	Adds Cloudwatch exporter based on ADOT operator integrating monitoring with CloudWatch.	✅	✅
CloudWatchLogsAddOn	Adds AWS for Fluent Bit to the cluster that exports logs to CloudWatch.	✅	✅
ClusterAutoscalerAddOn	Adds the standard cluster autoscaler.	✅	✅
ContainerInsightsAddOn	Adds support for container insights.	✅	✅
CoreDnsAddOn	Adds CoreDNS Amazon EKS add-on. CoreDNS is a flexible, extensible DNS server that can serve as the Kubernetes cluster DNS.	✅	✅
DatadogAddOn	Adds Datadog Amazon EKS add-on. Datadog is the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications.	✅	✅
Dynatrace	Adds the Dynatrace OneAgent Operator.	✅
EbsCsiDriverAddOn	Adds EBS CSI Driver Amazon EKS add-on. This driver manages the lifecycle of Amazon EBS volumes for persistent storage.	✅	✅
EfsCsiDriverAddOn	Adds EFS CSI Driver Amazon EKS add-on. This driver manages the lifecycle of Amazon EFS volumes for persistent storage.	✅	✅
EmrOnEksAddOn	Enable EKS cluster to be used with EMR on EKS	✅	✅
ExternalDnsAddOn	Adds External DNS support for AWS to the cluster, integrating with Amazon Route 53.	✅	✅
ExternalSecretsAddOn	Adds External Secrets Operator to the cluster.	✅	✅
FluxcdAddOn	Setting up Fluxcd to manage one or more Kubernetes clusters.	✅	✅
GpuOperatorAddon	Deploys NVIDIA GPU Operator on your EKS Cluster to manage configuration of drivers and software dependencies for GPU instances	✅	✅
GrafanaOperatorAddon	Deploys GrafanaOperatorAddon on your EKS Cluster to manage Amazon Managed Grafana and other external Grafana instances.	✅	✅
IstioBaseAddOn	Adds support for Istio base chart to the EKS cluster.	✅	✅
InstanaAddOn	Adds the IBM® Instana® Agent Operator to the EKS cluster.	✅	✅
IstioControlPlaneAddOn	Installs Istio Control Plane addon to the EKS cluster.	✅	✅
JupyterHubAddOn	Adds JupyterHub support for AWS to the cluster.	✅	✅
Kasten-K10AddOn	Kasten K10 add-on installs Kasten K10 into your Amazon EKS cluster.	✅
KedaAddOn	Installs Keda into EKS cluster.	✅	✅
Keptn	Keptn Control Plane and Execution Plane AddOn.	✅
KnativeAddOn	Deploys the KNative Operator to ease setting up the rest of KNatives CRDs	✅	✅
KomodorAddOn	Adds the Komodor Agent to the EKS Cluster.	✅	✅
KubecostAddOn	Adds Kubecost cost analyzer to the EKS cluster.	✅
KubeflowAddOn	Adds kubeflow Kubeflow pipeline addon the EKS cluster.	✅
KubeviousAddOn	Adds Kubevious open source Kubernetes dashboard to an EKS cluster.	✅
KarpenterAddOn	Adds Karpenter support for Amazon EKS.	✅	✅
KubeProxyAddOn	Adds kube-proxy Amazon EKS add-on. Kube-proxy maintains network rules on each Amazon EC2 node.	✅	✅
KubeStateMetricsAddOn	Adds kube-state-metrics into the EKS cluster.	✅	✅
MetricsServerAddOn	Adds metrics server (pre-req for HPA and other monitoring tools).	✅	✅
NewRelicAddOn	Adds New Relic and Pixie observability for Amazon EKS.	✅
NginxAddOn	Adds NGINX ingress controller	✅	✅
OpaGatekeeperAddOn	Adds OPA Gatekeeper	✅	✅
ParalusAddOn	Adds Paralus	✅	✅
PixieAddOn	Adds Pixie to the EKS Cluster. Pixie provides auto-telemetry for requests, metrics, application profiles, and more.	✅
PrometheusNodeExporterAddOn	Adds prometheus-node-exporter to the EKS Cluster. Prometheus Node Exporter enables you to measure various machine resources such as memory, disk and CPU utilization.	✅	✅
Rafay	Adds Rafay’s Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP) to the EKS Cluster. Rafay allows you to deploy, operate, and manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters	✅
SecretsStoreAddOn	Adds AWS Secrets Manager and Config Provider for Secret Store CSI Driver to the EKS Cluster.	✅	✅
Snyk	Adds the Snyk Monitor to the EKS Cluster.	✅
SSMAgentAddOn	Adds Amazon SSM Agent to worker nodes.	✅
UpboundUniversalCrossplaneAddOn	Allows Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters to manage the lifecycle of Crossplane distribution.	✅
VpcCniAddOn	Adds the Amazon VPC CNI Amazon EKS addon to support native VPC networking for Amazon EKS.	✅	✅
VeleroAddOn	Adds Velero to the EKS Cluster.	✅	✅
XrayAddOn	Adds XRay Daemon to the EKS Cluster.	NA	NA
XrayAdotAddOn	Deploys ADOT Collector for Xray to receive traces from your workloads.	✅	✅
GmaestroAddOn	Adds gMaestro cost optimization solution for EKS cluster.

Standard Helm Add-On Configuration Options

Many add-ons leverage helm to provision and maintain deployments. All provided add-ons that leverage helm allow specifying the following add-on attributes:

    /**
     * Name of the helm chart (add-on)
     */
    name?: string,

    /**
     * Namespace where helm release will be installed
     */
    namespace?: string,

    /**
     * Chart name
     */
    chart?: string,

    /**
     * Helm chart version.
     */
    version?: string,

    /**
     * Helm release
     */
    release?: string,

    /**
     * Helm repository
     */
    repository?: string,

    /**
     * When global helm version validation is enabled with HelmAddOn.validateHelmVersions = true
     * allows to skip validation for a particular helm add-on. 
     */
    skipVersionValidation?: boolean,

    /**
     * Optional values for the helm chart.
     */
    values?: Values

Ability to set repository url may be leveraged for private repositories.

Version field can be modified from the default chart version, e.g. if the add-on should be upgraded to the desired version, however, since the helm chart version supplied by the customer may not have been tested as part of the Blueprints release process, Blueprints community may not be able to reproduce/fix issues related to the helm chart version upgrade.

Helm Version Validation

All add-ons that derive from HelmAddOn support optional version validation against the latest published version in the target helm repository.

Helm version validation can result either in a warning on console during list, synth and deploy operations or an exception if the target helm repository contains higher version than the one leveraged in the add-on.

Example output:

INFO  Chart argo-cd-4.9.12 is at the latest version. 
INFO  Chart external-dns-6.6.0 is at the latest version. 
WARN Upgrade is needed for chart gatekeeper-3.8.1: latest version is 3.9.0-beta.2. 
INFO  Chart appmesh-controller-1.5.0 is at the latest version. 
INFO  Chart tigera-operator-v3.23.2 is at the latest version. 
WARN Upgrade is needed for chart adot-exporter-for-eks-on-ec2-0.1.0: latest version is 0.6.0. 
INFO  Chart aws-load-balancer-controller-1.4.2 is at the latest version. 
INFO  Chart nginx-ingress-0.14.0 is at the latest version. 
INFO  Chart velero-2.30.1 is at the latest version. 
INFO  Chart falco-1.19.4 is at the latest version. 
WARN Upgrade is needed for chart karpenter-0.13.1: latest version is 0.13.2. 
INFO  Chart kubevious-1.0.10 is at the latest version. 
INFO  Chart aws-efs-csi-driver-2.2.7 is at the latest version. 
INFO  Chart keda-2.7.2 is at the latest version. 
INFO  Chart secrets-store-csi-driver-1.2.1 is at the latest version. 

• Enable/Disable Helm version validation globally

import { HelmAddOn } from '@aws-quickstart/eks-blueprints';

HelmAddOn.validateHelmVersions = true; // by default will print out warnings
HelmAddOn.failOnVersionValidation = true; // enable synth to throw exceptions on validation check failures

• Enable/Disable Helm version validation per add-on

new blueprints.addons.MetricsServerAddOn({
    skipVersionValidation: true
})